Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.

How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much - so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins - without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?

Cruelty...prefers abstraction. Some have tried to resolved this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it woudln't be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn't do it.

In my dream, people apologized for things that were about to happen, and lit candles by inhaling.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

Someone needed to invent a way to be close to people without having to see them, or talk to them on the phone, or write (or read) letters, or e-mails, or texts.

He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.

She spent an afternoon staring at their front door. Waiting for someone? Yankel asked. What color is this? He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, It certainly tastes like red. Yes, it is red, isn't it? Seems so. She buried her head in her hands. But couldn't it be just a bit more red?

Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!

That's the difference between heaven and hell! In hell we starve! In heaven we feed each other!

I wouldn't want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.

All that mattered was him looking at me

We just stood there, facing each other, but nine floors apart.

I think about all of the things I've done, Oskar. And all of the things I didn't do. The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did.

Thinking would keep me alive. But now I am alive and thinking is killing me

An ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled.

I ran rather than walked, anxious to lose my way. All I wanted was to be unsure.

If I'd been somone else in a different world I'd've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.

I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live.

She would say to him, "But you are no priest." And he would say, "I am today." And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love.

A Seeing Eye bitch is not only for blind people but for people who pine for the negative of loneliness.

Given that eating animals is in absolutely no way necessary for my family — unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods — should we ear animals?

She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release.

From where she is, the page- her paper-thin future-is infinitely heavy.